Magento SEO – Top 5 Tips to Skyrocket your Ecommerce Sales

It goes without saying that Magento is the world’s largest ecommerce solution entrusted by online retailers and entrepreneurs across the globe, leaving behind all the giant platforms out there in the market. According to the latest trends, it has been figured out that the Top 1 million online shopping websites are running on Magento Commerce. Thus it is no wonder that clients are also looking to hire experienced Magento developers who can build up a complete mobile and seo-optimized e-shop from the ground up with all the “promotional tools”, “shipping and pricing options”, ”upsells” and “cross-sell” features configured rightly to pile up Gold coins this fiscal year. However, every merchant, small or large, who owns a Magento shop on the web still noodles around the most hypercritical question – How to set comprehensive conversion targets and meet online sales goals smartly. Obviously, there is no point listing unending number of products without having a transparent picture of the revenues and profits the e-shop can earn you and for this, the first and foremost step is to optimize your ecommerce website from SEO lens.

Whilst saluting your intelligent decision of choosing Magento Ecommerce Solution since it is the most search engine friendly platform amongst all others, we endeavour to solve all your search engine optimization queries by casting light on the tactics and practices that will help you gain quality traffic and subsequently manifold your revenues. So, here we go!!

Maximize Visibility across Search Engines

The key to exponentially increase your online sales lies in maximizing the probability that people will find you on major search engines. Hence, undoubtedly, the visibility of your website is directly proportional to the no. of potential visitors you will attract. Higher the search engine rankings, larger will be the number of visitors and bigger will be the conversions. So Let’s have a quick look at some of the tactics which will help accomplish this task.

1. Optimize all the Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
   Optimization of Titles and Meta Descriptions is an important aspect in Ecommerce SEO so as to help search engines identify the Page content and understand what the page is all about. To do this, just log in to the CMS/Admin Panel of your website and start editing page titles and meta descriptions of all your
   • Content level pages as
     Magento >> CMS >> Manage Pages >> Choose which page to edit >> General Information >> Page Title
     Now you can edit the title of the desired page but wait, don’t forget to limit your titles to at most 60 characters so that they are not snapped in the search engine result pages (SERP). Next, you need to edit the Page description as well by hitting to the meta description option present on the page information sub-menu. Again, limit your meta descriptions also upto a maximum of 160 characters.
   • For Category Pages as-
     Magento >> Catalogue >> Manage Categories >> Choose categories.
     Now you need to choose a unique page title and description for the chosen category.
   • For Product PagesIt is impractical to manually update the titles and descriptions for thousands of product pages if you have a Big online shop. So all you need to do here is automating both of these tasks by defining a custom rule like this -:
     “%PRODUCT%, %SUB_CATEGORY%, %CATEGORY%, KEYWORD % COMPANY_NAME%”
     Alternatively, you can purchase an external SEO extension to accomplish this task.
2. Create XML Sitemaps through Google XML Sitemap Generator
   To facilitate faster indexation by search engines, you need to let them know where your content is, and this is made possible through “XML Sitemaps”. Magento offers its own Google XML sitemap generator that not only creates a customised sitemap but lets you submit it to Google.Just Navigate to Catalog >> Google Sitemap >> Add Sitemap, choose a filename, path and store view and proceed by clicking “Save and Generate” Option. Lastly, insert the following code in your robots.txt file so that it can point the search engines to your sitemap.xml file:
   Sitemap: http://your_domain.com/sitemap.xml
3. Create search engine friendly URLs through URL Rewrite Manager
   The most important thing to do here is to change the default setting of the functionality “Add Store Code to URLs” to “No”. Next, you need to change the automatically generated URL into a “search engine friendly” URL and this is done by a tool called URL Rewrite Manager, which shortens your original URL into the one that contains targeted keywords. For Example- An automatic URL like this http://www.yourecommercesite.com/catalog/product/view/Id/3903/category/45 gets converted into a Search Engine optimized URL as – http://www.yourecommercesite.com/women/categories/ethnic-wear.html
   To automatically redirect all your traffic to the same base URL, you need to set the “Auto-redirect to Base URL” option to “Yes”. Also, remember to change the “Use Web Server Rewrites” option to “Yes” so as to remove “index.php” from all your URLs so as to convert them into search engine friendly URLs.
4. Allow the Robots Crawl your Content
   Let the Robots crawl over all your web content by customizing the “Default Robot Setting” to “Index, Follow”. Without this, the search engines will not index your website and hence it won’t show up in any of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Also, we recommend everyone to install a free SEO extension “Yoast Metarobots” that lets you set customised robot tags for CMS pages, Product pages and also allows you to prevent indexing of all your login and register pages & non-content pages through “noindex, follow” options. Plus, there are a host of other important features this module comes bundled with!! So, don’t miss this one!!

Cross-check for DUPLICATE CONTENT –

Duplicate and repeated content is a Big No-no in ecommerce seo. Magento offers an exclusive module to help you avoid publishing the duplicate content on the web. Just Install the free module- Canonical URLs for Magento and quickly navigate to

System >> Configuration >> Catalog >> Search Engine Optimization

Next, set the “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products” options to “Yes” before going live.

Pay heed to Keyword Relevancy and Image Optimization

This is indeed the most critical thing when you are optimizing an ecommerce site and are looking to go 10 steps ahead of your competitors. You must ensure replacing your keywords with logically relevant phrases that exactly match to what people enter in their search queries. Not, just this, you need to optimize your image titles with meaningful names and image alt text descriptions with relevant text.

For example – using “Buy Tomato Online” is more relevant than Using “Tomato” as the keyword.

Another important thing which is overlooked by most of the people is to use relevant “titles” and meaningful “alt tag descriptions” for all your category and product images. For instance – you must define the names of images as “women-kurta-black.jpg” instead of “cloth_photo_5.jpg”

Boost your Click Through Rates upto 30% more through “Rich Snippets”

With Magento, you can boost up your Click through rates (CTR) almost instantly using this Free Extension –MSemantic that enables rich item previews and star ratings to be displayed on big search engines like Google and Yahoo by adding data mark-ups to the webpages of your ecommerce shop. A screenshot shared below depicts how it looks in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Lastly, Monitor and Track your Magento Shop to Improve further!!

There are two tools that are used to monitor a Magento Ecommerce Site – The first one “Google Webmaster Tool” verifies your site and inserts a Google Webmaster verification code as shown below-

Go to System >> Configuration >> Design >> HTML Head

The second one “Google Analytics Tool” tracks all your traffic and generates customised analytic reports. All you need to do is, set up a Google Analytics account and get the unique “UA code” from there. Now login to your Magento CMS Panel and navigate to

System >> Configuration >> Google API >> Google Analytics

Next, you will be prompted to enter the unique UA number for your site. And that’s all, now you will be able to check your site’s SEO performance on a daily basis.

To have some cutting-edge features, thorough reports and advanced statistics, you can install a “Google Analytics Plus Extension” that is available on Magento Ecommerce site absolutely free of cost. This extension lets you combine your multiple sites into a single web analytic account and track all the purchases / conversions made through Google Adwords. Not just this, it allows you to filter your reports by customers and track each and every step of the checkout process by creating a comprehensive sales funnel.

The bottom line is, growing online business and selling 24X7 on the web, is not a piece of cake which you can have so easily. You need to proceed with a foolproof plan to enjoy the privilege of landing up successful in this competitive market with a virtual shop. Remember, there is no magic wand and you need to implement all the tactics shared above wisely to outreach more and more customers and boost up your conversion rates. Good luck!!